Okuda: Full Color Chaos
Amid abandoned factories and empty homes, quiet railway lines and dusty highways, the work of Spanish street artist Okuda San Miguel shines bright and big as life.Color is his medium—brilliant saturated yellows and reds and greens that clash and contrast, all arranged in precise geometric patterns. In wide murals that stretch across train cars and apartment buildings alike, Okuda’s style mixes an urban street aesthetic with abstract Surrealism. His subjects are a mix of faces, skulls, expressive animals, pruned trees, and headless gray bodies combined and collaged together.
“It’s Pop Surrealism from the streets,” says Okuda, in a recent email interview with Hi-Fructose. “Fluorescent landscapes, ornamental fabrics, brick skins, plastic animals, lost humans… Usually they talk about existentialism, the meaning of life, identity, capitalism, freedom, roots, nature, animals, and human feelings, but they don’t have a closed message. I love the way people feel something completely different in front of my art and make up their own message in relation with my themes, or not.”
Okuda’s interest in surrealism, striking color, and geometric shapes developed from his time studying fine arts at the prestigious Complutense University of Madrid. But his imagination stems from his childhood in the late 1980s and early ‘90s; summers spent selling ice cream in a kiosk that his parents ran, playing football, skateboarding, and illustrating. “I grew up in a worker’s neighborhood in Santander, a small city by the Cantabrian Sea,” Okuda says. “I started to draw when I was ten or eleven in sketchbooks randomly at school. My first references I saw in my city were [tagged] walls.”
Seeing art around him, as well as from studying artists in school like Salvador Dali and Max Ernst, motivated Okuda to draw letters and served as a launching pad. In 1997, when he was seventeen, Okuda started a graffiti crew called Jungle Jonky with local artists 2X, Cdd, and Cbx, painting up old factories and railway walls. In 2000, he moved to Madrid to study professionally at Complutense. It’s here that he picked up his unique style incorporating clean lines and color. Street letters transformed into circles, triangles, and rhomboids. “Later, I mixed my street geometrics with my surrealistic works in the studio,” Okuda recalls. “I started to do my own characters; humans, animals, and trees lost inside geometric architectures and landscapes.”
Okuda’s images may be clear but his message is complex. Among his frequently painted subjects are images of nude women, as homage to the female forms of the Renaissance. Often his figures are headless but Okuda is not committed to anonymity. He’ll just as easily depict an intimate, full-frontal face of Adolf Hitler as he would Mahatma Gandhi—or other polarizing famous figures such as Andy Warhol, Barack Obama, Charlie Chaplin, Kanye West, and Tupac.
And despite his overflowing use of color, Okuda balances his images with large swathes of gray. Often, what is colorful is ephemeral, appearing in the form of faces, animals, and rainbows. What is gray is organic, representing forms, nature, or the inner depths under the surface.
For complicated works that blanket buildings, Okuda’s actual process is somewhat straightforward. He’ll ask that his working surface, be it a wall, ceiling, or train car, be painted with a background color of his choosing in advance of his arrival. He doesn’t do sketches. Using photos of animals, faces, bodies, Renaissance or Mesopotamian sculptures, and other sources of inspiration, Okuda will translate those images to his own visual language. “It’s more fun to keep creating along the process of the artwork without planning too much before starting,” says Okuda. It’s an approach that has served him well: Today, Okuda’s work is now as globally widespread as it is physically sprawling, appearing in New Delhi, Hamburg, Mexico, Beirut, Africa, London, Los Angeles, and beyond.
It’s more fun to keep creating along the process of the artwork without planning too much before starting.
In 2014, Okuda was introduced to the Santa Barbara church in Asturias. Originally built in 1912 as a place of worship for the workers of an explosives factory in the northern Spanish town of Llanera, the building was abandoned after the Spanish Civil War.
Nearly a century later, a local skateboarding collective in Spain known as “The Church Brigade” acquired and renovated the space, envisioning Santa Barbara’s high vaulted ceilings and spacious interiors as the perfect indoor skate park. They invited Okuda to cover the walls and ceiling with artwork following the church’s reconstruction. After just a week, the artist had filled the space with work that had a connection with “Indian religion imagery because of the holy animals and colors” that Okuda used. Among the elements painted were literal starry-eyed faces, posed figures, and Okuda’s signature “Kaos Star,” an asymmetrical compass rose—which then inspired the church’s new name: Kaos Temple. It’s one of Okuda’s proudest accomplishments.
“It was a very important point in my career, my first indoor big art project,” says Okuda. “I decided to include all the iconography of my own world and characters inside the church, as a walking retrospective.”
When the newly renovated building opened its doors in December 2015, questions arose about the church’s conversion from a place of worship for parishioners to a place of worship for skateboarders. But the majority of local townsfolk who lived in Llanera—including old men who had previously worked in the church years ago—appreciated seeing the building come to life again. Now open to the public, Kaos Temple attracts pop art fans, historians, and skaters from all over.
Okuda’s reimagining of the church in Asturias was so well received that he was later invited to Morocco in May 2016 to paint another, this time as one of ten international artists spreading art through the town of Youssoufia, in the British Council of Morocco’s first annual Street Art Caravane. Titled “11 Mirages to the Freedom,” Okuda painted each side of a stocky chapel with the portrait of a person or animal, and the visage of a bear, a lion, and a bird on the front.
2016 was Okuda’s busiest year of his career. As part of the third annual HKWalls Street Art Festival in March, he brought to life the entire front exterior of a ten-story building in the Kowloon working-class neighborhood of Sham Shui Po in central Hong Kong.
“I was inspired by the architecture of the building,” says Okuda. “I saw that I had to use the corner perspective to do the figure, and that’s why it looks as if the animal’s nose is coming out from the wall.” The piece, titled “Rainbow Thief,” was one of the largest in the festival, and Okuda’s biggest building in Asia. With the exception of a single mustard yellow building beside it, Okuda’s wolf-faced facade is the only spot of color surrounded by a sea of gray and off-white residential towers.
In April, Okuda joined Italy’s Art in the Streets project, covering the outside walls of a kindergarten in the town of Arcugnano. “The local [town] council are really good, special people. Random people brought us coffee or food to the wall as we worked, and each day a different family invited us to dinner with them in their homes,” says Okuda. The children of the kindergarten watched as he brought birds, bears, and winged lions to life with the help of fellow artist and assistant Antonyo Marest, creating five murals with his message of positivity, love, and nature.
“When we had first arrived, the children gave me an incredible welcome: They had done a lot of drawings inspired by my works,” Okuda says. “It was a very special moment. For me, it was incredible that the Arcugnano [town] council put my name to this square.”
In June, Okuda was one of ten artists as part of Project M/9 Colors, an exhibition by Germany’s developing Urban Nation Museum for Urban Contemporary Art, emphasizing the innovative use of color in today’s technology-centric world. Okuda created a portrait of the enlarged bust of a dog, with balloons escaping from an opening in its head, and a shadowy masked figure positioned in the foreground but turned away from the viewer.
In August, Okuda painted a five-car commuter train in Kiev, spreading vibrant colors and his signature patterns across the Ukraine countryside. Okuda had painted more transport vehicles the year before in his native Spain. In November 2015, he worked with the Truck Art Project, which puts beautiful imagery by contemporary Spanish artists on the sides of transport company Pallibex’s fleet of trucks. Okuda brought to life three curious faces staring out on the side of what would otherwise be a plain-white commercial vehicle. This truck is now one of ten (the group’s ultimate goal is one hundred trucks total) currently roaming the streets and highways of Spain.
“I decided to include all the iconography of my own world and characters inside the church, as a walking retrospective.”
He traveled to Arkansas for the Unexpected Art Festival in September, transforming an empty house at the corner of Rogers and Garrison Avenue into a colorful “universal chapel” that celebrated nature and mankind.
Okuda hasn’t slowed down in 2017. He’s currently producing new studio work for a solo show at the Corey Helford Gallery in Los Angeles and various art fairs. Through the rest of the year, he’s nearly booked solid with a full schedule of international projects across Asia, Africa, Europe, and the United States. In addition to the world tour, he’s overseeing the development of his five-hundred-square meter art studio in Madrid, where he works with a team of artists.
In all of his pieces, there’s an inherent mystery to Okuda’s work. Despite a fresh contemporary approach, his art carries a spirit of folklore, like the modern retelling of an old fable. When he paints, we listen. As if he’s tapped into something ancient, calling forth premonitions—in the form of faces with knowing expressions, contemplative animals, and nature in the cosmos—that we’d be wise to heed.
“I love classic architecture and big buildings, and I like to work on different surfaces and environments,” says Okuda. “Usually the spaces come to me in different projects, and I’m inspired by a particular place and the people, the culture or religion of the country, or its ancestral iconography.”
Maybe this is why Okuda chooses not to create art on a small scale or exclusively hidden away in private galleries or homes. Rather, he releases his work out into the world, transforming abandoned public places of work or prayer. Reality is a struggle that Okuda acknowledges in gray forms, but he juxtaposes these images with vivid shapes. And outside, in the light of the sun, Okuda’s colors shine.
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